Building for the Energy Transition

Power electronics sit at the invisible centre of nearly every clean energy system, making EV chargers work, regulating hydrogen electrolysers and conditioning batteries before they leave the factory floor. Yet despite its centrality, the sector receives a fraction of the attention lavished on headline technologies like solar or EVs. For India, with 330 million registered vehicles, an accelerating renewables buildout and a government push toward self-reliance in critical manufacturing, the stakes are especially high. The question is whether Indian companies can move fast enough and at sufficient quality and cost, to claim a meaningful share of the infrastructure the transition demands — or whether that market defaults once again to Chinese imports.

Ador Powertron is one of the companies at the sharp end of that question. This 120-year-old power electronics company operating at the heart of India's energy transition. Its portfolio spans EV charging infrastructure, hydrogen electrolyser power sources, battery testing and manufacturing equipment, and (as India's largest road safety technology company) intelligent traffic systems. The business is fourth-generation family-run, led today by Chairperson Ravin Mirchandani. What follows is a conversation with Mr Mirchandani, on innovation, speed, trust, geopolitics and what it really takes to build for the energy transition from India.

You operate in sectors where customers demand both cutting-edge technology and uncompromising reliability. How do you balance the drive to innovate with the commercial discipline needed to scale profitably?

That's a question I'd struggle to answer if I were presenting to a private equity house. But the advantage of running a 120-year-old, fourth-generation business is that you can sometimes go with instinct and in 2021, every instinct told us the energy transition was arriving all at once.

Batteries were moving from lead-acid to lithium. Buses and cars were shifting from ICE to electric. Backup power was migrating toward renewables, which meant hydrogen was finally going to get a real shot. So, we made a big punt. We invested in three technologies simultaneously. You can't justify that on a spreadsheet.

But here's the commercial lesson: for years, you only needed to be one of three things: cheaper or faster, or better. Then post-Covid China showed the world you could be all three at once, ahead of both Europe and America. That's the new benchmark. If you're going to scale something sustainably, make sure you're hitting all three dimensions.

Power electronics involves long testing and qualification cycles. What indicators tell you a platform is ready to move from validation to customer deployment?

Back in the 1990s, I met people from Airtel and asked how they made strategic plans. The answer was essentially: the strategy department does its thing, and we just go out and get it done. The world has become exactly like that.

You cannot wait for your product to be perfect before going to market. Look at WhatsApp: BlackBerry Messenger was technically superior, and arguably still is today. But WhatsApp got out fast, iterated, built the subscriber base and won. Your customers will forgive you for failing fast. They will not forgive you for being late when someone else has already taken the space.

For EV chargers specifically — yes, you're supposed to get CE or UL approval before launch. But most customers will give you a pilot site to get market validation while you're still pursuing certification. You run the two streams concurrently. That's not reckless; that's how the market moves today. Ford used to take four years to bring a car to market. BYD does it in nine months.

Quote – ‘It is better to be wrong than late. Customers will reward the first mover, even if the product isn't perfect. They won't forgive you for arriving third.’

How do you maintain an innovation pipeline when every time you launch, the Chinese have already moved the goalposts?

We learned this painfully. We designed and manufactured India's first 30kW AC/DC converter, a product that every major player, including ABB, Siemens and Schneider, was importing from China. It took us 24 months, and we were impatient the whole way through. The moment we launched, China had already shipped a 40kW and a 50kW version.

So, the answer is ‘jugaad’ — the Indian instinct for concurrent, improvised problem-solving. You run your innovation, your testing and your certification streams in parallel, not in sequence. Is it messy? Absolutely. But in a sector moving as fast as ours, which resembles telecom in the 1990s, the entire ecosystem has adapted to accept concurrent development. Customers, regulators, even certification bodies understand the pace. You must lean into that.

Aero Powertrain's tagline is 'Delivering Peace of Mind.' When performance can be affected by factors outside your control, how do you maintain trust and brand credibility?

Ten years ago, we surveyed customers on why they did business with us. Two Hindi words kept coming back: nishchint (without worry/peace of mind) and bharosa (trust). That's where 'Peace of Mind' came from, although we did have to explain to a few people that we were not a yoga studio!

Here's the key insight, though: trust does not mean your equipment never fails. Equipment designed in India will have issues. We're on the same quality improvement journey Japan walked in the 60s, Korea in the 80s and China in the last decade. That's just the reality of moving up the value chain. What matters is what you do when it fails.

For us, that means response times. In the EV charger sector, we target 4-12 hours to respond, 24 hours to resolution. In battery factories or hydrogen electrolysers, speed of response is everything. The secret sauce is rapid innovation on one end and the guarantee that when something goes wrong, we are there to sort it out, before the customer feels let down.

How important is narrative (the 'Make in India' story, the safety angle, the reliability story) in driving customer acquisition?

Honestly? Less than I'd like. The Indian industrial customer, at the end of the day, rewards one thing: cost effectiveness. If the Chinese product is cheaper, the acquisition goes there, even in government tenders where Chinese suppliers are technically excluded, because some Indian companies will slap a label on an imported product and call it Indian.

So yes, we have our narratives — reliability, resilience, made in India. But the biggest lesson I've had to absorb is this: if you're not cost competitive, none of that narrative matters. Design to cost. Make sure you can compete with the Chinese landed price. If the government gives you some trade protection on top of that, it's a bonus. But it's not your reason for existence.

As a supplier to both public and private sector customers, how do you navigate the very different risk profiles and expectations between the two?

I want to separate direct government business from the broader public sector. Direct government contracts require a completely distinct mindset, skill set and frankly patience for payment cycles that most large Indian conglomerates are not built for. We're in that same camp; it's not where we play.

The interesting thing today is that the large private conglomerates have started to behave a lot like the public sector. They run formal tenders, have complex procurement hierarchies and have hired heavily from PSU backgrounds, this blurring the distinction. About 70% of our revenues today come from these large conglomerates or PSUs. The procurement behaviour is remarkably similar.

The remaining 30% is smaller businesses and that brings its own challenge: cash. In Indian B2B, you're almost always forced to extend open credit, which means a significant portion of your operational energy goes into collections. It's one of the structural disadvantages of industrial B2B in India versus consumer businesses, where money comes in upfront.

Geopolitics has moved from a background concern to a boardroom conversation. How are tariffs, supply chain dependencies and the US-China dynamic influencing your localisation strategy?

Geopolitics today essentially means, ‘What is Mr Trump going to do?’ or ‘What is Mr Xi going to do?’ We had equipment shipped to the US that got hit with a 50% tariff between the time it left Mumbai and arrived in New York and we had to absorb the difference. That is the world we're operating in.

The honest answer is that there's no spreadsheet model for a black swan. You can model margin compression, competitive price pressures or cost increases. You cannot model what happens if Taiwan falls or if Greenland becomes a geopolitical flashpoint. You just must live with it.

What we can control is our own localisation. We've localised our AC/DC converters completely for EV chargers, hydrogen and battery manufacturing. The one dependency that remains is integrated circuits, which must still come from China until Indian fabs come online. That's a structural reality for now.

Beyond that, our strategic focus has narrowed sharply to India. The Indian industrial market is forecastable with GDP growth between 6% and 8.5%, a government that behaves rationally, a market you can model. International expansion to Europe or the US is now 'bonus territory', not core strategy. The investment in international business development — exhibitions, headcount, warehousing, travel — is very hard to justify in 2026 when there's no visibility on what global trade will look like.

Quote - There's a PR job for India as an industry and as a government: shift the global perception from 'poor quality' to 'reliable and resilient’ and from 'the next China' to 'a pillar of the global economy’.

India is competitive against China in your sector but you mentioned that European customers are sceptical. What's the real barrier to India becoming the 'China Plus One' story it wants to be?

There are two barriers. The first is perception: European buyers have had genuinely poor experiences with Indian quality in the past, and perception lags reality. We have proven we can compete on price, quality and delivery but we carry the reputational burden of a supply chain that was, frankly, less reliable a decade ago.

The second is more subtle: Europe does not want to create another China. They became dangerously dependent on Chinese supply chains 20 years ago and are now paying the price. There's a real apprehension about running that playbook again with a different country. That's a legitimate concern, and it will not be resolved by individual companies proving themselves. It requires a coordinated national narrative, both from industry associations and from government.

That conversation is not happening in India at the scale it needs to. If we're serious about China+1, if we want 'India' to be a word that comes up confidently in global boardrooms, there needs to be a sustained, credible campaign to reposition India as a reliable, resilient manufacturing partner, not just a cheaper alternative.

Are industrial customers genuinely pushing for self-reliance in clean technology and how is Ador Powertron aligning with that shift?

India's pollution problem is genuinely complex. The instinct to reduce it to a single cause, whether that's diesel cars or Punjabi farmers burning stubble, is part of why it has not been solved. Let's look at the actual data.

There are 330 million registered vehicles in India. 82% are two-wheelers and three-wheelers. Another 12% are trucks and buses. Cars, the category everyone talks about, represent just 6%. If you want to clean Delhi's air, you start with the rickshaws, the scooters and the last-mile delivery trucks, not the cars.

The good news is 2025 was the first year a clear majority of new rickshaws sold in India were electric. That's a watershed. The next steps are clear: electrify intercity buses (the government is already moving in this direction), mandate electric for last-mile delivery within the NCR and create strong enough incentives or age-based restrictions to accelerate the transition of two-wheelers. The grid can handle it. Charging infrastructure can be built at scale without being predatory on price.

Beyond vehicles, the burning of crop residue, the construction dust from the massive infrastructure buildout, the cement and roads — these are all contributing factors that do not get enough airtime. You can have the most rigorous emissions controls on a cement plant and then have all of that defeated by an open construction site next door. The pollution challenge needs to be attacked at all these levels simultaneously. The piecemeal approach is exactly why the problem persists.

What's the single most important piece of advice you'd offer to young leaders navigating innovation and uncertainty?

The lesson I'm sharing is one I borrowed from Rajiv Bajaj, who was talking about his own experience in the EV world: ‘It is better to be wrong than late.’

That sentence has become a kind of North Star for how we operate. The temptation in any technically complex business is to wait until the product is right, the testing is complete, the certification is in hand. The problem is, in a market moving at this speed, by the time all of that is done, you're already number three or four and you may spend the next twenty years trying to catch up with whoever went first.

WhatsApp was not the best product when it launched. It wasn't even close to BlackBerry Messenger on technical merit. But it went first, it iterated and it won. BYD five years ago had a ride quality that didn't compare to Tesla’s. Today it exceeds it. That's the power of going early and iterating fast.

If you want to understand why Germany and France are struggling economically right now, it's partly because they build products sequentially: design, test, certify, launch. China builds concurrently. That difference in process philosophy has massive compounding effects over time. The lesson for any leader: get out there, make the mistake, iterate and your customer will forgive you. Arrive late and they won't.